Vocal Stutter Edits in Ableton Live

Got a question about how to do house music style stutter edits in Ableton Live. There area few different ways to do this, here’s two:

Arrangement View Editing

This gives you the most precision

Zoom in in Arrangement view, select a 16th or 32nd length slice:

Duplicate it a few times (command-D to duplicate). You can select shorter-duration slices, etc.

Effect Stutters

There are a lot of different plugins that do this stuff and get really in depth, I’m doing it here with a simple Beat Repeat preset. Make sure to check the other Beat Repeat presets, and also the DJ/Performance presets in the Audio Effect Rack section of Live’s Library.

To install the preset, right click and save as to download, navigate to where it’s located on your hard drive from Live’s browser, drag it into your set.

You can save itso you’ll always have it in your Library after that (you could also drag it directly to Live’s Library Presets folder if you know where that is, I keep an alias to this on my desktop).

Turn the Repeat knob up to start chopping, and then you can set the level of repeating you want with the other knob.

You can automate this in arrangement view:

…or play it in session view, and record your tweaking with the Global Record button (this will record the automation into Arrangement view).